This is the living room of a "prefabricated, sustainable design-build project by the College of Architecture, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the College of Engineering at Texas Tech University."
Kit homes of yesteryear! Here's a bit more info on them; a list of the plans is available here.
via Boingboing
Pasadena, like Santa Barbara and a few other communities in southern California, has a very large number of beautiful, well-preserved Craftsman homes. Home to several Greene & Greene masterworks, the town also hosts an annual Craftsman Heritage Weekend (this year's just ended) which is always worth a visit should you be in the area.
With its combination of typical Southern California sun, wide streets and the overhanging canopy of huge old trees, Pasadena is also a photographer's heaven. Here's a little gallery I'm in the process of building on Flickr.
In November, I'll head to Chicago for an annual 4-day trip with my father and uncles. We're all big Craftsman fans and fans of interesting American architecture in general, and would love to take a tour of, say, an interesting architecturally-significant neighborhood and/or a few Frank Lloyd Wright homes, or other buildings of note. Any particular suggestions for tours or groups we should contact?
note: article updated with new image & details
2900 Buena Vista Way in Berkeley, California is home to a rather unique property, one which many local residents don’t even know about given its location on a hillside high above street level and the fact that it’s almost completely shrouded in olive and pine trees.
Originally built in 1927 for Samuel James Hume and Portia Bell Hume – the former professor of theater arts at the University of California and the latter a pioneer in the field of community psychiatry – Hume Cloister was designed by John Hudson Thomas based on a very specific 13th-century Augustinian monastery in Toulouse, France.
I’ll try to get some pictures from the inside – maybe the owners have a few photos they wouldn’t mind sharing with us. All I know is that the interior details are pretty incredible – enormous wrought iron chandeliers, a deep wishing well, a beautiful cloister, spiraling stone staircases. It sounds terrific!
There aren’t many images of the house available online, and not many other textual references either; this fellow lived in the area and writes a bit on it, and includes some maps and pictures; the home sits on a tract of land known as La Loma Park; finally, Hume may have been involved in this staging of Henry VI, which took place on the property. I’ll post contemporary pictures if I can find some!
Grant Scholbrock lives in Portland, Oregon, and – if these photographs are any measure – is one of the greatest Lego architects of our time. His focus includes architecturally significant and unique skyscrapers in the United States, landmarks across the world (check his photostream for a terrific White House and Taj Mahal), as well as important Arts & Crafts homes.
After his earlier (and beautiful) Robie House model, Grant decided to build a tableaux of the Greene brothers' Gamble House in Pasadena. After Three months worth of work and at least 500 blocks – which included a trip to Los Angeles to visit the real thing (Grant took numerous photographs of various details to supplement the images he found online; this was his sixth trip to visit the building), the piece is finally finished. He's had several requests for various Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, and hopes to someday complete a model of the Blacker House, especially if he's able to visit it during the 2010 Pasadena Heritage Weekend.
See more photographs of this project – and many others – in Grant's Flickr stream. And, if you're so inclined, Grant and I would both like to know what you'd like his next project to be – do you have any favorite buildings that would lend themselves to this kind of model-making?
Inception, the new Christopher Nolan film about psychic espionage, includes a number of scenes in an extremely striking, obviously Greene & Greene home. Scenes in a hallway, dining room, kitchen and back yard show off cloud lift cabinet pulls, green ceramic mosaic tile in the kitchen, and Japanese-inspired lamps (and a front door with some very interesting stained glass inserts) that could be made by the Greenes or very talented imitators.
Does anyone know which house this is? It may be right on the Pasadena arroyo, if it is in that city, as the backyard is gently sloped down away from the back porch. I've heard much of the film was shot in and around Pasadena, so that gives a bit more weight to the idea that it's a real Greene & Greene, rather than a set.
It's so sad to see something like this – a very cute, sharp looking bungalow (on the outside), with a horribly anti-Craftsman bath and kitchen inside, which totally ruins the entire Arts & Crafts feeling of the entire place. Why spend all that money on a kitchen that is exactly the opposite of the style of the house? Successful remodels are always in the context of the house as a whole, and don't try to rebel against it.
Pictured: demolished in 2007, the often-photographed William Livingstone House – a good example of Detroit's (and especially Brush Park's) long, slow, and ongoing architectural apocalypse. Incidentally, the house was the first commission by eventually very well known architect Albert Kahn. Photograph above is uncredited and was passed on to us by Fipi Lele; if you can tell us who shot it, please do in the comments below.